“KIND OF YOU and Nicola to make us supper last night.”
“Come on, Jamie,” Andrew said, “that’s not kindness, it’s a joy. We’re so glad she’s back and mending. And besides, you’re family. Wouldn’t you do the same for us?”
“Reckon we would, but the food wouldn’t have been as good. I’m not much of a cook. What do the police and fire people say?”
“Arson. No question. They found a bit of evidence, but nothing yet to connect with whoever started this.”
Andrew and his building partner were standing inside the charred shell of the gardener’s house on Saturday morning.
“So, what do you think, Jamie? Do we tear it down?”
Jamie shook his head and smiled.
“What?”
“Stone doesn’t burn.”
Andrew looked at the heat-scorched walls. “No kidding, but…”
“Look, if we had used mortar to bind the exterior walls, like most builders do, the fire’s heat would have corrupted that bond. You can tell: the mortar changes color, turning a dark pink. That’s the sign it’s lost its strength. It becomes crumbly. In that case, we’d have to tear down the whole structure. But we’ve been building those walls dry first, like they did long ago, using the stone’s own weight and strength to lock in the bond. Later, we’d have tied it all together with a vertical sandwich of mortar and thin concrete blocks on the interior surface, then solid-core insulation, and finally drywall. Thankfully, we never got that far.”
“What’s next, then?”
“Pressure-wash to take away the soot and stench, right down to the clean stone, flush it all out, then carry on as we have been. The washing’s messy but the walls will hold and we want this stink gone. Everything else? The interior framing? The roof? We start over. We’ll need to salvage the roofing slates, though, as many as are not broken. Worth a fortune they are now that the slate mines are nearly gone. We’ll look for reclaimed ones to match. I know a source.”
Andrew ran his fingers through his curly salt and pepper hair. “Thank goodness Sir Michael is insured.”
“Amen to that.”
“But still, Jamie, why would someone set fire to an empty building that was under construction?”
“Because they could, Andrew, because they could. Put your professor’s brain aside for a moment. It was here. It was easy. And, because whoever did it had no idea Lee and Randi or my Flora would have been involved, it was safe, like lighting a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night.”
“So, you think it was some sort of prank?”
Jamie looked at the ruined interior. “Oh no, Andrew. Not at all.”
“ZIP LIGHTER CUBES are produced by Standard Brands, a big international conglomerate,” Detective Constable Terry Bates said on Monday morning. “Their lighter production facility is north of Dublin, just south of the border with Northern Ireland.”
“Convenient, that,” Morgan Davies mumbled from her desk opposite.
“Sorry?”
“Incendiary devices. The Troubles? The bombings? Oh, you’re too young for all that. Forget it. What do you have?”
Bates hadn’t a clue what Davies was on about. This was often the case. But she carried on: “That batch number fragment pressed into the cardboard—I wish we had more of it—tells us, according to the company, that it was shipped to southwest England somewhere. But that’s the best they can do without the rest of the numbers. There’s a small Co-Op supermarket in St. Just that carries Zip cubes, they say. But they’re available in almost every market in Cornwall and Devon as well.”
“So we have nothing.”
“Right.”
“Bugger…”
EVER THE HUSKY, Randi was leading far ahead as Lee rounded Porthglaze Cove just before noon on Monday. It was as if he needed to clear the way and make sure the path was safe for her. He’d run ahead, then run back, panting, to lead her. Today, she was on her way to explore the ruined and overgrown hut circle above Boswednack Cliff. When she’d first moved here, Drew had taken her to Chysauster, the preserved Iron Age settlement a few miles to the south, near Penzance. It amazed her: the walls of the round houses and the storage and livestock shelters were still there, weathered to only a few feet high, sure, but intact, thousands of years later. So now she’d decided she’d be the explorer who’d find new mysteries in this ruin closer to home.
She was watching the sun dance on the waves coiling into the cove below when, over the boil of the surf, she heard Randi scream.
He was still screaming and writhing when she found him, his right foreleg clamped and bleeding in a leg hold trap. There had been some kind of meat atop the trigger plate of the shallowly buried trap. She didn’t know much about traps but she sensed something about this whole situation was wrong. Back at the farm in Boscastle, her parents had used peanuts or peanut butter as bait to lure badgers into wire cages. Then they released them to the high moorland. That much, she knew. But leg holds? They were illegal, her father had said. And besides, right along the coast path?
Lee tried to pull open the jaws clamped against Randi’s foreleg but the spring was too strong and she could only get it open a fraction of an inch before it clamped shut again. Randi was frantic, thrashing. She kept her head, looked around, and began collecting stone fragments from the ground. She pried open the clamp as far as she could, wedged a shard of rock into the hinge, then repeated with ever-larger pieces until she finally was able to extract Randi’s bleeding leg.
Randi lay in the grass exhausted from the shock and the struggling, bleeding heavily. Trying not to panic, she tore a sleeve from her tee-shirt and tied it tight above the wound to stanch the flow. Then she squatted, wrapped her wiry arms around the dog’s deep torso, bent her legs, rose unsteadily, and set him atop her bony shoulders, clutching his good legs. Randi did not fight, but he weighed three stone, Lee barely eight. She did not know where the strength came from and there was no way she could ever carry the whimpering dog all the way home, but she hoped she could make it at least to the Tinners, less than a half mile away. She staggered along the Coffin Way through the daisy-dotted meadows, lifting the crippled dog over one stone hedge after another, resting a few minutes on the other side, shouldering him again, and starting over. She talked to him constantly. A walk that should have taken fifteen minutes took nearly an hour. Her legs were rubbery with fatigue. She pushed the pub’s door open with her head and collapsed to her knees on the stone floor. Randi rolled off her shoulders and screamed. Her clothes were covered with blood. Lunch patrons froze. Clare called David down from the office upstairs.
The watcher who had followed at a distance slipped down the farm lane beside the pub to the coast path and turned south.
“HE HAS DAMAGED tendons but no metacarpal fractures,” the doctor at the St. Ives Veterinary Surgery explained later that afternoon.
“What’s that mean?” Lee demanded. The girl was angry and afraid. She was still in her bloody clothes.
“Please, sweetie, try to calm down,” Nicola said, knowing her words would have little effect. Randi was the girl’s closest companion. There was no calming her.
The vet understood. “Here, come look at this x-ray. See these four bones just above his paw?”
“Yeah. So?”
“They’re called metacarpals. Look closely: do you see any dark lines cutting across any of those bones?”
She peered at the image. “No.”
“Correct. That means none are fractured. That’s the good news. But the jaws of that trap, well, they dug into a few of the tendons that connect his leg muscles to those four bones. Must have hurt like anything. None were severed, thank goodness, but they’re damaged a bit and certainly sore. They need to mend. The blood came mostly from his skin, which he tore up trying to escape. I’ve used a few stitches to sew him up safe and sound. I’ll remove them in time.”
“How much time?”
The vet smiled at her impatience. “He’s a strong, healthy boy and he’ll mend quickly. But your friend won’t be able to run around the countryside with you for a while. You’ll need to keep him safe at home. He’ll need to keep still for a week or more and then not run loose from your house for a bit. You’ll need to keep him on a lead. I’ll see him again in two weeks. I might be able to take the sutures out by then.”
“How will he pee and poop?”
The doctor chuckled: “He can come out on a lead for just a few minutes. He’ll know enough not to put weight on that foreleg. He’ll get by on only three.”
“You sure about this?”
“Do you want your dog back in tip-top shape?”
“That’s a silly question.”
“Correct. So, do what I’ve said and he’ll be right as rain in no time, okay? I promise.”
Lee looked at the vet as if judging his competence. Finally, she nodded. “Does he come home now?”
“Certainly. I’ve got a big carrier kennel for him. He’s ready to go. He’ll stay in the kennel for a while as he heals. I’ve given your mother antibiotic and anti-inflammatory pills, as well as painkillers should he need them.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“No?”
Nicola looked at Lee.
“Well, almost,” the frightened girl said.